1. Technical Field
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to industrial vehicle navigation systems and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for using pre-positioned objects to localize an industrial vehicle.
2. Description of the Related Art
Entities regularly operate numerous facilities in order to meet supply and/or demand goals. For example, small to large corporations, government organizations and/or the like employ a variety of logistics management and inventory management paradigms to move objects (e.g., raw materials, goods, machines and/or the like) into a variety of physical environments (e.g., warehouses, cold rooms, factories, plants, stores and/or the like). A multinational company may build warehouses in one country to store raw materials for manufacture into goods, which are housed in a warehouse in another country for distribution into local retail markets. The warehouses must be well-organized and use floor space efficiently in order to maintain and/or improve production and sales. If raw materials are not transported to the factory at an optimal rate, fewer goods are manufactured. As a result, revenue is not generated for the unmanufactured goods to counterbalance the costs of the raw materials.
Unfortunately, physical environments, such as warehouses, have several limitations that prevent timely completion of various tasks. Warehouses and other shared use spaces, for instance, must be safe for a human work force. Some employees operate heavy machinery and industrial vehicles, such as forklifts, which have the potential to cause severe or deadly injury. Nonetheless, human beings are required to use the industrial vehicles to complete tasks, which include object handling tasks, such as moving pallets of goods to different locations within a warehouse. Most warehouses employ a large number of forklift drivers and forklifts to move objects. In order to increase productivity, these warehouses simply add more forklifts and forklift drivers.
Some warehouses utilize equipment for automating these tasks. For example, some warehouses employ automated industrial vehicles, such as automated forklifts, to carry objects on paths and then unload these objects onto designated locations. Many such warehouses offer few natural landmarks from which an automated vehicle can derive an accurate position and few have available locations on which navigational markers or beacons may be affixed. When navigating an automated industrial vehicle, it is imperative that vehicle pose computations are accurate. A vehicle pose in this context means its position and heading information, generally a pose refers to a position of an object in space with a coordinate frame having orthogonal axes of known origin and the rotations about each of those axes or a subset of such positions and rotations. If the industrial vehicle cannot determine a current pose in physical space, the industrial vehicle is unable to execute tasks. Thus automated vehicles typically employ an internal map or representation of the physical environment including the position of some navigational landmark references from which the vehicle pose may be calculated.
While using fixed infrastructure landmarks as a basis for localization or as a location to mount landmark beacons is known, using substantially pre-positioned objects or pallets as landmarks to facilitate navigation is not known. Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for localizing an automated industrial vehicle using dynamically placed pre-positioned objects as the majority of the landmark references.